her skirts.     

       “Know anything?” demanded Augustus of the stranger, breaking the somewhat remarkable silence.     

       The stranger evidently did not understand. It was necessary for Augustus, the witty, to advance further into that odd silence.     

       “What’s going to pull off the Lincoln handicap? Tell me, and I’ll go out straight and put my shirt upon it.”      

       “I think you would act unwisely,” smiled the stranger; “I am not an authority upon the subject.”      

       “Not! Why they told me you were Captain Spy of the Sporting Life—in disguise.”      

       It would have been difficult for a joke to fall more flat. Nobody laughed, though why Mr. Augustus Longcord could not understand, and maybe none of his audience could have told him, for at Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square Mr. Augustus Longcord passed as a humorist. The stranger himself appeared unaware that he was being made fun of.     

       “You have been misinformed,” assured him the stranger.     

       “I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Augustus Longcord.     

       “It is nothing,” replied the stranger in his sweet low voice, and passed on.     

       “Well what about this theatre,” demanded Mr. Longcord of his friend and partner; “do you want to go or don’t you?” Mr. Longcord was feeling irritable.     

       “Goth the ticketh—may ath well,” thought Isidore.     

       “Damn stupid piece, I’m told.”      

       “Motht of them thupid, more or leth. Pity to wathte the ticketh,” argued Isidore, and the pair went out.     

       “Are you staying long in London?” asked Miss Kite, raising her practised eyes towards the stranger.     

       “Not long,” answered the stranger. “At least I do not know. It depends.”      

       An unusual quiet had invaded the drawing-room of Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square, generally noisy with strident voices about this hour. The Colonel remained engrossed in his paper. Mrs. Devine sat with her plump 

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